Steve Hochstadt: Extreme conservatives talk a lot about liberty. But their definition of liberty doesn’t always include my liberty. I want my police force to protect me from all kinds of threat, including those of the far right.

Dotty LeMieux: As I watched one of my favorite all time classic feel good All American holiday movies, A Christmas Story, last night, I couldn’t help but cringe that the plot of that whole show revolved around one little boy’s desire for a bb gun.

Dick Price: Mitt Romney – because he has no values beyond promoting his own and Lady Romney’s welfare – he’ll take the NRA’s money and oppose any sort of reasonable gun regulation. Which makes him forever the Gun Lobby’s Mitch.

Tina Dupuy: Just like cutting taxes doesn’t increase revenue—making gun ownership unlimited doesn’t make us safer. It’s a lie. A fairy tale of the gun lobby. Completely unsupported by data or logic. A falsehood.

Michael Sigman: The three so-called top-tier Republican presidential candidates — Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann — are, even as we speak, busy disavowing their inconvenient earlier statements by employing what an old boss of mine called the “Let’s do a 180” strategy.

Tina Dupuy: The Republicans siding with the Birthers and generally ramping up of the anti-immigration sentiment, are shooting themselves in the foot. And not just with Latino voters. Schwarzenegger is by far the most popular and (gasp) competent of any other candidates vying for the nomination in 2012.

Los Angeles

Michael Krikorian: There may be more doomed locales in town – the coroner’s identification room, a hospice where the only hope is that the end will soon come – but, for a mass gathering of gloom, nothing beats the CJ crowd on a Sunday.